The Faddish Breakouts of Ethnography

2009 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-9 ◽  

Ethnographic research has been described as a fad that promised to look beneath the rationalisations of consumers, but did not in fact deliver the cut-through promised by agencies. This perhaps provides a clue to the emergence and relative disappearance of ethnography over the past 20 years, and to its recent re-emergence. To the generalist market researcher, ethnography appears to come and go in terms of its popularity and appeal. To avoid being disappointed about what an ethnographic approach can bring to an understanding of consumers, clients should reportedly involve a qualified anthropologist at the commissioning stage of a project to make sure that such an expensive and time-consuming exercise is really warranted. Similarly, clients should engage research companies with a long history of undertaking ethnographic studies and with expertise in the area.

2009 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-4
Author(s):  
Clive Boddy

Ethnographic research has been described as a fad that promised to look beneath the rationalisations of consumers, but did not in fact deliver the cut-through promised by agencies. This perhaps provides a clue to the emergence and relative disappearance of ethnography over the past 20 years, and to its recent re-emergence. To the generalist market researcher, ethnography appears to come and go in terms of its popularity and appeal. To avoid being disappointed about what an ethnographic approach can bring to an understanding of consumers, clients should reportedly involve a qualified anthropologist at the commissioning stage of a project to make sure that such an expensive and time-consuming exercise is really warranted. Similarly, clients should engage research companies with a long history of undertaking ethnographic studies and with expertise in the area.


2020 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
pp. 15-21
Author(s):  
Madhusudan Subedi

  Most epidemiological studies focus on the direct causes of diseases while wider, social causal factors are ignored. This paper briefly highlights the history of major epidemics and the role of Anthropocene and Capitalocene for the emergence and reemergence of pandemics like COVID-19. Books, journal articles, and statistics offer information that can explain the phenomena. A historical inquiry can inform us about the fundamental causes of pandemics. Human security and ecology are intertwined, and the global effect of pandemics responded to at the national level is inadequate. The lessons from the past and present help us devise effective ethically and socially appropriate strategies to mitigate the threats. If the present crisis is not taken seriously at the global level, the world has to face more difficult challenges in years to come.


Author(s):  
Charles R. Cobb

This chapter provides an overview of landscape studies in archaeology, particularly as practiced in the southeastern United States. There is an extended discussion justifying historical anthropology as an important point of departure for this study, in particular because of its usefulness for exploring processes of colonialism. The chapter provides summaries of the major Native American groups and European powers that appear in the remainder of the volume. Generally speaking, the three major European players, or the Spanish, English, and French had different goals and methods of colonization. These methods cumulatively spurred a highly ramified history of landscape transformations for Native Americans. The chapter’s approach resonates well with post-colonial approaches that attempt to decolonize the past by removing Europeans as the primary lens by which we view the actions of Indigenous peoples. Working under rubrics such as “Native-lived colonialism” and “decolonizing the past,” archaeologists increasingly are seeking to integrate European texts, the archaeological record, oral histories, and the perspectives of Native peoples to try and achieve a plural perspective on past lifeways.


Author(s):  
Marc Raymond

Martin Scorsese’s name has come to symbolize many broad ideas over the past few decades, to the point where he is no longer merely a filmmaker, but rather a cultural touchstone. He is associated with a particular religion (Catholicism), ethnicity (Italian), genre (gangsters), and time period (New Hollywood), while also being the foremost cinephile in American cinema, influencing whole generations in his wake. Consequently, the amount of writing on Scorsese is quite vast, and this bibliography will try to represent that variety while pointing readers to the best of this work. It is thus organized with a focus on Scorsese’s own scholarly contributions, interviews, career overviews, anthologies, major films, documentaries, and influence. There is a temptation to try to divide the work thematically, since so much of the writing centers around either religion, ethnicity, or masculinity, but doing so would risk perpetuating this overemphasis in the scholarship while also not representing the best writing on this important auteur. Thus, while certainly the work on Italian-Catholicism and masculinity will be frequent within the citations to come, they will not predominate among the selections taken as a whole. This bibliography also attempts to give some of the history of Scorsese scholarship itself, focusing on scholarly touchstones that tended to define particular historical moments and how Scorsese has been useful to particular critical approaches and/or arguments.


1996 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 21-28 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juliet Harper

Life story work has long been established as a highly effective means of helping children separated from their birth families to come to terms with a history of abandonment, rejection and loss. However, the traditional method of using photos, drawings, writings and memorabilia from the child's past to create a life story book may not always be possible or appropriate. Juliet Harper presents four case studies in which, for various reasons, it was necessary to pursue alternative methods of life story work, for instance through play and the exploration of dreams. She underlines the importance of truthfulness, sensitivity and flexibility on the part of the therapist, and the need to constantly watch out for clues from the child. In following their lead, she asserts, the most constructive path towards rebuilding their sense of self will be found.


2019 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan M Kenyon

Drawing on long-term ethnographic research in the Blue Nile town of Sennar, supported by archival and historical documentation, this article explores the history of Zar spirit possession in Sudan, and the light this throws on the interplay of religions over the past 150 years. Life history data supports the argument that contemporary Zar is grounded in forms and rituals derived from the ranks of the ninteenth-century Ottoman army, and these remain the basis of ritual events, even as they accommodate ongoing changes in this part of Africa. Many of these changes are linked to the dynamic interplay of Zar with forms of Islam, on the one hand, and Christianity, on the other. In the former colonial periods, political power resided with the British, and Khawaja (European) Christian Zar spirits are remembered as far more important. Today that authority in Zar has shifted to spirits of foreign Muslims and local holy men, on the one hand, and to subaltern Blacks, on the other. These speak to concerns of new generations of adepts even as changes in the larger political and religious landscapes continue to transform the context of Zar.


2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Liza Utami Marzaman ◽  
Zulham A Hafid ◽  
Amiruddin Akbar Fisu ◽  
Nurhijrah Nurhijrah

The Batupasi people are the inheritors of the historical fragments of the Lalebbata area. Lalebbata is an important space in the history of Palopo City, where the economic, socio-cultural and religiosity of the Palopo people begins. This activity was carried out to try to explore the collective memory, the root of the problem and the hopes of the Batupasi residents for their increasingly 'aging' living space. The effort was outlined in a Place Making Workshop activity where Batupasi residents were invited to jointly express their dreams, hopes and imaginations in the process of being creative in shaping and rediscovering their neighborhood. This activity consists of 2 items, namely old photo exhibition, mapping and participatory planning. This process allows citizens to be able to take an impression of the past which has become their cultural values and social identity through a process of continuously defining the space which is then projected into the future so that it can continue to be felt until for the generations to come. In addition, this activity aims to identify the problems faced by Batupasi residents related to social, cultural, economic and inhabited areas.


2002 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 219-252 ◽  
Author(s):  
Assimakis Tseronis

The publication of a dictionary is a means to describe, codify and ultimately standardise a language. This process is complicated by the lexicographer’s own attitude towards the language and the public’s sensitivity on language matters. The recent publication of the two most authoritative dictionaries of Modern Greek and their respective lexical coverage reveals the continuing survival of the underlying ideologies of the two sponsoring institutions concerning the history of the Greek language, as well as their opposing standpoints on the language question over the past decades, some 25 years after the constitutional resolution of the Greek diglossia, affecting the way they describe the synchronic state of language. The two dictionaries proceed from opposing starting points in attempting to influence and set a pace for the standardisation of Modern Greek by presenting two different aspects of the synchronic state of Greek, one of which focuses on the long history of the language and thus takes the present state to be only a link in an uninterrupted chain dating from antiquity, and the other of which focuses on the present state of Greek and thus takes this fully developed autonomous code to be the outcome of past linguistic processes and socio-cultural changes in response to the linguistic community’s present needs. The absence of a sufficiently representative corpus has restrained the descriptive capacity of the two dictionaries and has given space for ideology to come into play, despite the fact that both dictionaries have made concessions in order to account for the present-day Greek language.


Author(s):  
Agnieszka Pasieka

Abstract Based on long-term ethnographic research, this article contributes to the growing scholarship on far-right social movements by presenting an in-depth account of the Italian far-right scene. In presenting personal accounts of three activists and situating them within the milieus in which they are active, it sheds light on a variety of factors that push youth to engage in far-right militancy. Many researchers of far-right extremism have asserted the need to provide more in-depth knowledge on far-right militants, yet there remain important gaps that this article strives to address. First, it demonstrates the value of the ethnographic approach in the study of far right, which offers unique insights into the motivations for involvement and the relations between ideas, beliefs, and practices. Second, it shows the importance of situating present-day activism in a historical context, not only by looking for long-term patterns but also by paying attention to the ways studied actors engage with historical comparisons. Third, in engaging critically with some commonsensical approaches to far-right activists, the paper suggests that ethnographic studies of far-right activism can give us fresh perspectives on broader social phenomena beyond the far right per se.


Author(s):  
Thomas Prendergast ◽  
Stephanie Trigg

This book destabilises the customary disciplinary and epistemological oppositions between medieval studies and modern medievalism. It argues that the twinned concepts of “the medieval” and post-medieval “medievalism” are mutually though unevenly constitutive, not just in the contemporary era, but from the medieval period on. Medieval and medievalist culture share similar concerns about the nature of temporality, and the means by which we approach or “touch” the past, whether through textual or material culture, or the conceptual frames through which we approach those artefacts. Those approaches are often affective ones, often structured around love, abjection and discontent. Medieval writers offer powerful models for the ways in which contemporary desire determines the constitution of the past. This desire can not only connect us with the past but can reconnect present readers with the lost history of what we call the medievalism of the medievals. In other words, to come to terms with the history of the medieval is to understand that it already offers us a model of how to relate to the past. The book ranges across literary and historical texts, but is equally attentive to material culture and its problematic witness to the reality of the historical past.


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